Slippage
by my paper teeth
Summary: The eating infected her. The fat curled up in her mouth and slipped under her tongue. Choking her and her sad little mind / Cat, Jade, consumed / potentially triggering material
1. Chapter 1

_The eating infected her. The fat curled up in her mouth and slipped under her tongue. Choking her and her sad little mind / Cat-centric._

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[**warning- potentially triggering material**]

I've wasted the past six years on a notion that I thought to be true. I'm a perfectionist and an obsessive, and thanks to the conjunction of those two qualities, clinically underweight. Since the age of eleven I've gone through consecutive cycles of restriction, purging and near religious punishment, which finally culminated in me being hospitalized in july. Choking on my own vomit as I slowly blacked out on the floor of my bathroom, was never the way I intended to pop my clogs, especially at the tender age of seventeen, but this disease that has riddled my body, made me lose my teeth, my hair and my sanity. I'm seventeen and I have dementia, eroded molars and a fucked up digestive tract.

It's a lousy excuse as to why I haven't been writing for the past six months, but in July my parents dragged me kicking and screaming to an eating disorders unit where I was clinically diagnosed with anorexia nervosa. I guess not many people like it when you try to kill yourself. So after nearly four months of being locked up and then painfully discharged from inpatienting, life still sucks. I've been forced to gain over a stone and a half and still have so much more to gain, threatened with a section and a naso-gastric tube and been feed on a diet of liquid supplement.

Sorry if this seems pathetic, laying all my cards out on the table to complete strangers, but there's a nameless solitude in that. It is what it is, and perhaps the more I talk about it the less ashamed I might be. This is perhaps my own sad little way of divorcing myself from this illness.

It also might make reading this a little easier. These aren't constructions of fiction, but moments plucked from my own experience and those of the girls I lived with at the EDU. Genuine thoughts and feeling that hopefully flesh out this sad mess of words and phrases.

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_The content is mine, but the characters are the property of others. _

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**CHAPTER 1**

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It was Jade who taught Cat how to disappear

It was Cat who taught Jade to reappear.

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_She's young; she's tiny. _

_She's viewing the world from lash-laced eyes, _

_Her mum stands before her, twisting the lid of the milk carton. She shouldn't be doing that. _

_They're in the middle of the isle, shopping for groceries. _

_Both have their hair tied up; they always style it the same. Her mother's chaos of burnt red curls bursting from the flimsy ribbon that fastens them to the base of her neck. Her dad kisses that neck. Her dad kisses her neck. _

_She's full on the ice cream and pancakes from that morning._

_The pancakes her mother made her. Pancakes made with love she told her. _

_She remembers the sticky mess she made, eating with squirrel bites to make each one last. Her mum wouldn't let her but she wanted more. She'd stuck her fingers in the batter for one last taste, but stuck them too far back and felt her abdomen lurch. _

_She's sniffing the milk. They're alone in the isle. She's swinging her legs. Arranging jars, label forwards._

_Just her, her mum and her stomach, full and warm and round, seven years of comfort, seven years of timely meals, never late, never missed. _

_She's drinking the milk. Having decided it's not off. A dribble slides out from her mouth. _

_The carton falls from her hands. _

_She turns round. Her hands are shaking. _

_She's watching her mum collapse to the ground through tiny lash-laced eyes. _

_She on the ground, splayed out. The milk runs free from the open mouth of the carton, spilling out across the lino floor of the isle, freely mixing and soaking into the woman's clothes, two patches, a stain between her legs from muscles loosened by spasms and the growing spill, as the sea of crisp white envelops her mother like a wedding silk._

_She watches later as the paramedics cut open her shirt and pronounce her dead. Someone has a hand on her shoulder, heavy, like meat. _

_They failed. She failed. They all failed to bring her back from the brink. Failure, failure of the heart killed her mother._

_Why isn't she crying? All she can feel is her food._

_They failed. She failed. _

_Her reaction comes at last outside the supermarket as the contents of her stomach splashes out across the tarmac floor_

_The food, the love, the feelings all spill out of her, and she is quietly complete at last._

_._

_._

She doesn't know how it begins, and she doesn't know how to stop.

Within her is the integral sense of wrongdoing.

She clings to the festering; the comments that slip from rotten mouths, through tombstone teeth, to curl in the air like ugly smoke. Like fish hooks, they slid under her skin, splintering off, and though retracted, their barbs remain, still sunk into her flesh.

Perfection was an attribute she knew she'd never attain, but was a tantalizing siren call, that would ebb and flow on the shores of her mind.

The thoughts crouched inside her, like a figure, hazy and undefined, voiceless as of yet, but a constant presence that had been there for longer than she cared to remember

It was part of her, a fragment that she chose not to isolate, but to cherish and attempt to connect to. A lost piece to her disposition that she was desperate to find, to fill that stain shaped hole that her mother had torn from her as she had collapsed on that supermarket floor.

She wasn't looking for perfection. She was looking for completion.

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To Be or Not To Be

_Cat just didn't know _

The script is slammed down on her lap, it having apparently being lobbied from quite some distance.

Her dialogue has already been highlighted, sickly yellow dashes up and down the page, entitling her to the role of Elizabeth. The anorexic. The violin play, trophy winning, obsessive religious anorexic.

She's happy about it though. A two act, three-woman play, with Jade and Joanna too.

Jade is not happy. _Naturally. _Apparently Sikowitz has deemed her to be the underachieving fat sister.

The word of 'type casting' spreads round like wild fire. Cat doesn't know whom it's meant to be aimed at. Her or Jade.

_Well it can't be her. _

The comment shouldn't bother her really, but it sticks to her, rests upon her back, clinging to her by the spine.

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_She's eight. _

_Her mother's been dead for just over a year now. The anniversary was spent packing boxes and filling black bags. _

_Her father's a silent wreck. He doesn't let it show, but loosing his wife has greyed his soul, as well as his hair. He has no idea how to raise a child by himself, no clue in hell. He's twenty-nine and newly widowed. He'd thought life would be like a script, prewritten and as smooth as paper. But he'd been a fool. A fool to marry a woman a decade older than him. A fool to marry his teacher and a fool never to try and grow up, to let the woman he had a mother complex with raise their children and be the only adult of the house. _

_But she's dead now, and he has an eight year old daughter and a six year old son, and so he's packing up and moving across the country. _

_Moving to a state that's lurid and bright, and that'll wash down the sorrow with orange juice and gin and make dulling his feelings quicker and help him forget the only woman he's only ever truly loved._

_._

_._

Healthy, there's nothing healthy on the menu.

'You okay there Little Red?' Andre questions, out into the hot, hazy sun.

'Yeah,' she glazes, 'They've run out of turkey.'

'Cat I swear you eat enough turkey to wipe out a whole species,' Tori calls from behind.

'Not that much,' She whispers. _Go__od __lord __does __she? _'I eat a healthy amount. I do right?'

She turns to Andre and he nods.

Tori swings up towards the counter, twisting her tight abdomen at the same time to turn to Cat. 'You need to eat some shit every once and while, beat that dairy dread!' She pokes the girl's shoulder, and Cat flinches slightly.

She looks to the menu again, and blanches. With turkey gone there's no lean meats left, and the canteen doesn't sell fish.

'I'll have a green salad please.' She hands over the money, and receives back a clear plastic box filled with vegetation and moves away, following Andre to find a table.

She's safe, she hopes. There wasn't anything dairy in there, which she might react badly from, and nothing crunchy that she could choke on and the dressing in it's little pot could be avoided so she didn't have to worry about cholesterol. She was safe, and the salad, she was sure, wouldn't kill her.

Andre breaks through her reprieve. He leans towards her, his face so close she can feel his breath, 'You good?'

'I'm always good Andre,' she smiles back with courtesy.

He gives her a long quizzical look, and for a second she feels like she's going to break in half for lying to him, but his interest doesn't seem to linger and soon his gaze passes.

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_She's thirteen. _

_Never a gangly child, but always lithe and limber. She prides herself on a neck that is long and tanned like a giraffe. She likes the way that if one were to decapitate her, her neck would be the perfect slate on which a knife could slice. _

_She doesn't often think like that. Of decapitation and mutilation, those thoughts suit the dark haired girl who lives over the fence better, but sometimes thoughts float up to surface in her mind. Morbid thoughts. Of dying and death. _

_It's her birthday, and she's alone. Later her father will pull a cake from the fridge and the candles, lit with his novelty nirvana lighter will illuminate her steadily aging face with an flickering, orange glow._

_She's alone in the vast crowd of the canteen. Since moving to California, her family have travelled like gypsies, never sticking to more than one place for longer than the gestation of a child. Sometimes they move because her father looses a job, sometimes, less often though, he gains one, and they'll uproot and move a few miles. She's been introduced to far too many people, and had to say goodbye to even more. She is eternally the new girl, forever in front of new faces and classes, listing off her name and age, her likes, her dislikes, to rooms full of bored students who have no care for who she is, their glazy eyes reflecting off her short life story. _

_She goes unnoticed for the greater part of her early life, but occasionally a girl or a boy might approach her, and her heart might leap at the prospect of a companion, only to have it dashed when they might pull at her hair or elbow her in the ribs and spill her lunch. _

_She's gained a tainted vision of the world and her view of herself slowly wanes. She wishes to be washed away, to escape to the sea and live with the mermaids, but she knows that she's too balloon-like in her pubescence to ever be able to dance into the depths. _

_It's her birthday, and she's alone. She's alone in the vast crowd of the canteen, a new school she's been at for nearly a month now. She sits a little a part from everyone else, her hair newly dyed to mark the move, and hopefully, like a bizarre peacock, attract a similar soul. _

_Her father's forgotten her lunch again, so the little change in her pocket is spent on the canteen's only offer of hot food; a chicken burger. It's slimy, clammy with grease, but she's too distracted with doodling on her bag to care for today. She hasn't been caring for months now, her father hasn't been either, and so for her, at lunch each day, a chicken burger is repeatedly consumed. _

_She knows she shouldn't. Her mother's death, apart from anything has left her with a steadfast dissatisfaction with consumption, and a vigilant health streak, a strict obsession with eating healthily; lean meats, colourful food; whole grains and polyunsaturated fats. _

_But this concept has been escaping her recently, and she feels herself slipping into something. She's been sleeping a lot. Perhaps she's depressed. _

_The clack of heels against the lino catches her attention and she looks up. A tall, blonde girl, one that she's seen around the halls, her speech always delivered like a question, an uplift of a home ground californian pitch. The girl is underdressed for the september sudden chill. A diamond belly piercing peaks out of her pink crop-top, a sugary façade, as tacky as she is desperate. _

_She parts her frosted lips, and utters those immortal words._

'_You know if you're going to eat a burger every single day, you're going to get really fat.'_

_Cat's not frozen, she just chooses not to move, her eyeballs roving in their sockets, from the outline of the girl's plump mouth, out across the blurred room, down, down, down to the flat patty splayed out on it's crinkling pinstriped wrapper. _

_She sits there for so long she doesn't notice the girl leave. It's both the first and the last time she'll ever see her. She sits there as the cogs of her brain, rusted from the pain and sacrifice and the misery and the god damn chicken burgers finally begin to turn again. _

_She had changed herself so thoroughly for this fresh start. She'd dyed her hair and brought straighteners and brand new sneakers for this school, in a vain attempt, like honey to bees to attract a friend. _

_She tried so desperately to fit in, to scrub always all blemishes, all faults that would lead to taunts, but here, they'd found it, a reason to despise her. _

_They didn't like her. They hated her. They'd found their fault._

_Eating was a fault_

_And faults make you incorrect, they make you ugly and incomplete. _

_Faults were the pathetic companion of punishment._

_._

_._

She blames the salad dressing. It must have leaked out into her salad, because three days later she hunched over the toilet puking up her guts.

It's the middle of the night, her brother and dad asleep in their separate rooms and she's alone, sitting on the cold bathroom floor, orange goop hanging in slick strings from her gaping mouth. She tries to call out but her throat is clamped shut and the room shifts every time she moves her head.

She resolves to stand, and grasping the sink with two hands lifts her heavy, leadened body from the ground.

The room spins in a plethora of colour, and she begins to see lights, tiny flickers, astral spectres that sparkle in her vision. The room a sea, these specks of tiny bioluminescent plankton illuminating the early morning blues.

Standing up was a mistake, her stomach violently contracts with the shift in gravity, the bile in her tummy boiling in it's raw flame, spewing up and out again, spraying across the tiled floor, dripping through her fingers as she tries to cup the outpour of churned up chime.

The darkness consumes her, she vaguely feels the slap of the floor against her back on then later the touch of hands; neither rough nor soft, just present against her sick slick skin.

_._

_._

_She looses seven pounds when she's fourteen, but no one notices. _

_She gains it back and a comment is granted with every pound regained._

_._

_._

She has food poisoning

They prattle off latin names and lists of symptoms and blame uncooked this and uncooked that, but deep down in her heart she knows it was the oil that caused this.

The oil that slipped from it's container, to bleach and soil her salad and crawled down into her throat, over her tongue to push it's way down into her stomach. To sit there, droplets of oil, thousands and thousands of tiny golden goblets, lying in wait to be emulsified and set free, free to settle on her hips, her thighs and arms.

The butterfly is unpinned from her arm and she's sent home from hospital with only a thin white wristband and a course of medication to mark her briefly interrupted sleeping patterns. She's made to lie in bed all day long, the covers pulled up tightly to her neck, so underneath she's hot and sweating. She lies there, pouring over her script, her eyes roving the pages, tracing those little black marking that command her to speak with the soft pads of her finger tips.

This illness won't mean a thing. She'll learn her lines and then recover and return to school, prising open the doors of the black box to take her rightful place on stage. She'll be perfection, her delivery pitch perfect, her intonation well placed, and at last she will become spectacular.

These lines will burn into her mind. She'll make it so.

She hasn't eaten in almost thirty-three hours. Five grains of shredded wheat this time yesterday were promptly swallowed and then with a lurching wail, regurgitated; back into the light. Her stomach bubbles with a ferocious pain that she can feel scattered across her body, her jaw aches; as though a hot white flame were being passed across the lining of her throat. She needs to eat, but that involves movement, and sound too, if she wishes to call out for her father. No, she decides, it was better not to move. If she were to throw up again that meant another day missed, another day absent from the stage.

She'd rather lie there, clammy and cold, both juxtapositions settled together across her skin, and learn her lines, as though the dialogue were her only anchor amongst the raging waves of nauseation that crashed within the liquids of her stomach. No, she'd stay in bed, stay and learn her lines; to stay well placed, in her little sanctuary, stay firmly in the seat of control over her body and mind.

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_It's night and the whistling bugs outside serenade her discomfort. _

_She feels clammy. Ever so clammy. A creeping sensation travels up her spine, but she won't let go of the duvets edges, pulled firmly over her head. _

_She's out of her mind. Beyond it now, travelling light-years away, past spectral planes, past layers of heaven, chiffon breezes in space that float between her limbs, making her cool and warm all at once. She's travelling, but she has no inclination where. There's an assurance that she'll meet her mark; she has no ability to waver from this path, she is simply carried, weightless and wan. Her hair ripples, but it is only the faintest of feelings. Does she still have hair? Does she still have a face? Arms? A body even? She feels so loose. As though her ligaments have unravelled and now restlessly squirm away, like ghostly worms, out into the sands of space. Has she flesh and bone? She can't say. She is a traveller, and nothing else. Likened to a jellyfish. Pure water; encased in membranes that through some unseen, unspoken predisposition create the constructs of her figure. _

_She has arrived. A placid lake stands before her. She has no notion of what colour, or size, or depth it might be, as no interest lays there, so it simply does not exist. _

_A voice, as still as glassy water, calls, resurfacing from across this hidden lake. From the opposite shore, a voice quietly beckons her. She is drawn forwards, like a sailor to a siren; she swims out with flaccid arms, or rather the notion of arms, for she cannot see any about her. _

_This voice plucks a familiar tune on the chords of her mind. It had been seated there, in the caverns of her cerebrum for quite some time, and in this roost of her mind, this voice plays king, or perhaps queen, it's sex having not yet been divulged. The voice was taught and tiny, commanding a cold and lingering line. It had always been there, she was quite sure of it now, as she surfaced on the shore, it had just always resided in a different part of her mind. _

_And there the voice lay before her. A woman, or rather parts of one, lying scattered out across the sandy shore. She gathers the parts to her chest and at once she knows who and what the voice is. It was the gap between her legs; it was the crease in the folds of her stomach, the ragged joint of her elbow and the press of flesh between her arm and chest. Insignificant significance in the smallest of details that solemnly wrapped it's self around her waist. The arms of a woman laced loosely around her middle, with every breath, she could feel this new embrace tightening. She turns. _

_The owner of the arms, a woman, willowy and slight, has the face of a clock, or rather the hands of one, numerals floating above where her nameless face once was. 89, 88, 87, 86._

_The hands slowly turn with an exquisite delicacy, before softly settling on the number 72, distinctly smaller in size from its previous sisters. With a sigh, the woman's chest inflates, and deflates, hands rotating with a greater speed to now indicate the number 106. The number is clunking and obtuse, and somehow threatening; enough to make her recede back into the water. But like sunlight on her retinas, the number lets a white hot imprint on the fluttering fabric of her mind, glowing in the murky depths of the water she now sinks into. _

_Slowly she resurfaces into consciousness. _

_The seed is sown. _

_The time is set._

_._

_._

She walks into the black box after nearly a fortnight of absence. The rows of seats stand solemnly empty. Jade, Tori and Joanna, are on stage together, Cat's dog-eared, brightly highlighted script clasped tightly in Tori's hand. Her fingers rake the lines that once were Cat's, but no longer, lost now to the whispering and ill timings of Tori's supposed talent.

The three girls, alone in the room apart from the three harsh spotlights settled on their shoulders, turn to face Cat, at the call of the door as it closes.

She's standing there with her knees knocking together, waves of wooziness retuning to her. Jade looks pissed, Joanna indifferent, but Tori, Tori looks frightened.

Jade wordless walks towards her to envelop her in an embrace, whispering in her ear '_I__'__m__glad__you__'__re__better,__I__'__ll__sort__this__out.__'_

Jade whips round, breaking their bond as Tori manoeuvres towards them.

'Right, Vega, shift it.'

Tori stands solidly, her hands rolling the script into a tight cylinder. Joanna, in the background, picks at her nails.

'Give it over Vega, or do I have to call you dumb-ass again? Cat's here, so you're done.'

Jade's hand extends, a command at Tori to lay the script out in her splayed palm; but it remains empty.

'I'm not done. I'm sorry Cat, but Sikowitz gave me the part.' She looks down, avoiding Cat's eyes, avoiding Jade's glare. To cement her statement, she twists the script a final time and squeaks 'Permanently.'

Cat leaves as quickly as she entered, a brass blush of embarrassment plastered across her face. She doesn't know what to do with her self. She feels washed away and still a little sick.

She'd lost the part. She'd be fool to deny that it didn't mean anything to her, but as she slumped by the bins, round the back of the redbrick confines of her school, she feels as though it's just another dashed dream to add to the growing pile. She wishes to dissolve, right there and then, to be washed away so she no longer have to face the shame. She feels so stupid, but all the most, ever so lost. What would she do now? Her life had taken an altered course, no matter how small, and she hadn't been there to witness it. She felt so sparse, so horrifically out of control.

Toris legs, spidery and sparse hurriedly pass her by, not even bothering to turn towards her in acknowledgement.

She feels the familiar lurch of her stomach. That prickle of unease. She tries to wash it down with large gulps of water, but ripple of fluid down her throat pools in her stomach and only fills up the feeling.

_Trace back the feeling. _

She was a failure. Those were the spoils of her war.

She was a failure.

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She's home again. Pressed upon sheets, she swallows down tears as she wallows in cotton confines. The wet waters of her dream still lap across her skin. The nerves in her skin feel alive, writhing beneath her skin, as though slippery eels course through her tight veins. She needs to do something with herself. She'd been uncharacteristically feigning prolonged sickness for the past few days to avoid having to breach out into school. That dream, days old, now provides the only source of sense, even though it plagues her mind as she tries to dig deep enough to resurface any recollection of who that woman might be. Facets of the dream slowly slip from her memory, the grains of remembrance draining away to construct newfound thoughts. But one detail still sticks in her mind. _106._

Mopping away her tears with the corners of her limp pillow, she swings herself out of bed. With new conviction she marches to the bathroom and pulls out a dusty metal square from beneath the sink. It makes an awful squealing sound as it settles itself upon the white tiled floor. She composes her self, and steps forwards onto its face. With a sigh of compression, the scale breathes out the secret of her stature.

_106 pounds. _

She blanches at the site of it.

That can't be right, can it?

She'd always been small, tiny, petit, elfin, but now, she was deemed a triple figure. Perhaps she was still stuck on the idea that her body remained, frozen in time, as boyish and hipless as the girl that had stood in that milk soaked isle of all those years ago.

The slow red number dribbles in her mind with a disgusting trail.

_No, no, no, no._

Wrong. right.

She'd let herself go. All that milk, all those chicken burgers and spoonfuls of oil, had collected inside her, swelling up over the years to push her past her preperceived boundaries. She couldn't have this. How could she let this happen, and more importantly how could she let this continue? The clock-faced woman of so many nights ago resurfaced in her mind.

_Tick, tick, tick, the numbers slowly drain away, revolving, transforming, shivering away. Whittled down to the bone, those numerals heralded the secret of her new construction._

_._

_._

A key clicks in the lock.

And the fester begins to grow as an ugly curl of flesh,

Slowly in her saturated stomach.

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Comments and reviews would be nothing short of perfection. I've written the majority of this story out already, it's just a matter of adding flesh to the bones, and any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Of course if anyone has any questions or opinions on the subject matter, don't hesitate to message me.


	2. Chapter 2

[**warning - potentially triggering material**]

The decent is very quick.

It bubbles beneath the surface for an age, and then one subtle detail slips in, and your whole world is transformed. It very quickly slides from 1200, to 800, to 600, and then to the point where 200 signifies an anxiety attack, and anything that is not single digits, can not be consumed. It's like slippery slope, the further you slide down, the tougher it is to go back up, it becomes a physical impossibility to go back.

Christmas is coming and my therapist as a lovely gift has already singed the papers to send me to the adult services when I turn 18. Which is in five months. Still I'm finding this quite therapeutic, to spill my guts out. They do say that personal experience makes for easy writing.

Reviews are to be adored. And if anyone has any questions or opinions on the subject matter, don't hesitate to message me.

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_The content is mine, but the characters are the property of others._

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**CHAPTER 2**

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The world around her shivers and sighs, a gale of absent minds and thoughtless utterances.

At first it's so very hard.

It's been two days since her discovery on the scales, and that step onto it's shiny surface feels like the first step on an ill trodden path. She senses a shift, but not so much into a new plain of being, but a click, as though a cog has slid into place, a key fitted smoothly into a lock.

She doesn't know quite what to do with herself. Her new resolve has no commandments, she feels as though she's in a limbo, not sure where to place her falling feet. Because she's running, running ever so fast, but her steps are stumbling and she needs to alter and refine her pace.

So she constructs her conquest. Conquest over her failings, over her faults and feeble features. She will achieve her just punishment. All the times she has been told she's wrong, incorrect, incomplete, she summons up, like a witch, draws them up from the depths of her mind, to stir them together to make a stew for self-improvement.

She needs to be tactical if this is going to work. A goal and a plan. Because she mustn't let on, no one can know her newfound punishment. It'll be a game, just by herself, alone against the rest of the world.

She is lost, and not yet found, and this, this is a quest, a quest towards completion, a quest towards a hazy goal, of which she is not quite sure.

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_the dreams keep on coming back._

_a clock ticking. _

_This time now spectral cutlery appear, floating on trays of starched linen. They lie there, waiting to be dined upon, for her eyes to fest upon their cool, hard bodies. No sides have they, just pure, grooveless bodies, that slip and slide within her hands. _

_She has no idea what they are intended for, and she can't help but wonder. _

_The press of two fleshes; a knife and her own; the pale plain of her upper arm outstretched as though before her. The arm is dripping. White liquid dribbles down the sides of her arm, to slip away, off and under her skin. _

_She imagines her arm is like cream, a light consistency, made of no more than whipped air._

_The knife is slicing through her arm now, of it's own accord, yet her hand is still rapped around it's hilt, as it dissects her naked muscles. More milk bleeds from her arm, but the knife drives deeper, her skin giving way, as though it were slicing through water. _

_The knife is through, past entering her skin; it flutters away, weightless, borne on silent spectral seas. _

_Her arm is hollow as it hangs in the air before her, dismembered, no longer her own._

_Like the rushing sound of beads, a cascading roar fills her ears, as the arm swells in size. Bigger and bigger it grows, until from the mouth of the open stump, burst forward a flow of hard, black specks. _

_Maggots tumble to the impossible ground, writhing as they go. _

_She's full of maggots. They eat her out from the inside, feasting on her organs, digesting her flesh, to hollow her out and burst forward, into the light. _

_A plate full of worms._

_Worms meat she wishes she could be. _

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The failure at first still stings. To sit there in class, and hear the lines, _her lines_, reverberate around the round, is akin to madness. Like a new tattoo, etched across her back, the failure it is a constant presence. But still a creature amongst a crowd. This is not her first heartbreak, and neither will it be her last. School is unbearable. The eyes glint, like roving storm clouds as she passes them by in the gaping halls. It's hard to keep balanced. Her breath is sharp and ragged, as though a knife, serrated and clean, just like the ones she observes in her dream has been plunged into her neck, inserted across to block her windpipe.

_Tori swans around on stage her voice barking and her hands gesticulating wildly. False tears burst from crocodile eyes as she laments, this rail of a girl, a pale sheet of a figure, and wails and promises 'I'll eat, I'll eat.' _

The knife seems to have jammed itself between the vertebrae of her neck, for now even food cannot pass by its hard surface. She doesn't have the heart to eat breakfast anymore. It's easily avoided too. A quick, 'I'm late' excuses her from suspicion. Though suspicion from what? She knows plenty of girls who skip lunch. It just isn't a necessity anymore it seems. Jade, Jade doesn't eat breakfast. Jade doesn't eat much of anything anymore anyway, but still, if she can forgo it, why can't Cat?

It seems she is now blessed with time. Without breakfast, she can inject new parameters into her morning. Without the presence of food, she leaves the house early, to make the three and a half mile journey to school, which if cantered along at a fast tred, she can cross in almost half an hour. A cool burn plays around her calves and she feels comfort, comfort in the discomfort she is inflicting. The feel of a tight hand around her legs, from where they are weary, squeezing her muscles as they wine for rest. _Not yet, not yet. _She is on a quest is she not? A wizard or perhaps a knight of some sort, intent on reaching their goal, fighting through hardship, never allowing themselves to be blinded by distraction.

Though a distraction this has become. The cool crow of her stomach calls all morning long, and she revels in the dissatisfaction her body moans when no release is provided. As the day pass, the hunger subsided. _9 o'clock, 10 o'clock, 11 o'clock; _the time at which her stomach begins it's gurgling serenade recedes each day, her body becoming more and more accustomed to her daily fasting being broken much later. She is getting better; her body is evolving. At last a change is brewing, beneath the surface, beneath her surface, to burst forth from her eyes and mouth and consume her, chew her up and spit her out until she is nothing but a chewed up pulp of raw flesh and feathers.

_She believes her self to be a caveman now. _

_She eats only protein and vegetables_

_She is raw inside and out_

.

.

_800 calories now. That's all she'll have. Food, if it has to, must be consumed between the hours of 1 and 7. _

_6 hours; a rule, a confinement. More testaments flutter behind her eyelids. Like a thick sludge, the cogs of her brain have been glued together with a tar like treacle. It's been two weeks now, two weeks of convincing herself that 'this food' and 'that food' will in fact kill her. That's what drives away the cravings; the fickle ghosts of taste that prickle the buds of her slack tongue._

'_That, that bread will kill you. Be sure of that. It'll slip down your throat, a bolus of half digested food, slippery with your spit, thought not slippery enough. It'll lodge in your throat and stick, stick so that you cannot breath, so that you go red in the face, then purple, then blue, as the oxygen is cut from your brain and you die, listening to the crackle of blood vessels bursting behind your eyes.' _

_She's not sure where the voice has surfaced from. She is quite sure though that it does not belong to another, but she can feel it on her fingers, and across her back, the shiver of a presence, as unseen hands trace their digits across her enlarged skin. _

_._

.

She's left the table; she's alone in her room.

The lights are all out reserve for the crack of a pale glow that slips through the crease of her door. It's eight at night but already the exhaustion has sent in. Around her she's built up sheets and pillows, but slumbers on neither, they covet her, cover her, but she cannot converge with them.

The mattress sinks under her father's weight as he settles himself at the end of her bed. It's enough of an indent to permeate her sleep, and with hazy eyes and a groggy mouth, she rises out of the corona of cotton.

'You okay? You missed dinner tonight?'

'Yeah - yeah.' The word feels funny in her mouth so she attempts it again, this time with greater conviction.

'I had a chat with Alex, that you missed.'

'Uh huh? What about?' _should she be worried?_

'I'm inviting someone round tomorrow night, I think you'd like to meet them,' _the ambiguity is making her head spin._

'Who?'

'I met a girl.'

'Girl?'

'Oh no - she's twenty nine, no -' he snorts in embarrassment 'She's a really cool gi- woman - happy?'

She giggles as she watches him struggle at finding a word to pinpoint such a woman.

'She's just really, really cool, and I like her, a lot -' he's babbling furiously.

'And you wanted to invite her round?'

'If that's okay with you?'

'Did Alex say it was?'

'Yeah, yeah. I think you'd really like her. I want you to like her.'

'You're serious, aren't you? About her.'

Her dad rub the back of his neck and grimaces as though in apology '_yeah'_

'Don't be sorry. I'm glad.'

'But are you really?'

'I think I am dad. I really do think I am. Things are slotting into place. I'm on the cusp of happiness. I can feel it in my toes.' She wriggles them for good measure and kisses him on the forehead. Perhaps she should feel bad for lying, but truly, she's not. Because the lie doesn't feel as though it is a lie, not really. Perhaps she is on the cusp of happiness, or perhaps rather she's just lost all her emotions. As though dragged out in bloody strings, her feelings have deserted her. She's numb, emotionless. A block of ice that's slowly melting under the scorching sun.

'So is that a yes?'

'Yeah, I think so.'

He gets up to leave; her bed springing back under the release of his weight. He means to go but pauses at the doorframe.

'So next Friday, we can have dinner together, is that okay?'

'Yeah.'

It's like a punch to the stomach. A sudden weight drops upon her shoulders. _Dinner. Next Friday. _She hasn't eaten dinner in weeks.

She's left alone, cool beads of sweat gleam as they trace paths down her neck as raggedy breaths heave the carriage of her chest back and forth.

_She can't._

_She just, can't. _

_._

_._

_600. _

_600, a week later seems much better. It becomes easier to just not eat. Before, before it was a struggle, but now, it's perversely hard to push herself above five hundred. So many foods can be simply tossed away, removed from her previously acquired tastes. The sickly sense of starvation is all she desires, the knowing that she is undoing herself, like a zip pulled down from her forehead, over the crest of her nose, past the curve of her neck to grace a path between her receding breasts leading into the hollow of her concave stomach to nestle it's way between her legs. And from this orifice, this unholy mess of her unzipped bodies will leak the resentment and the self loathing, the guilt and remorse and the lies and battering her body has received over the years, and out from her exposed innards will flow a flood of tendons and bile and piss and misery. She'll empty her organs out onto the ground, and from this hollow shell, out she'll step, like a reptile, renewed, birthed again into the empty dusk. _

_._

_._

Her bathroom is mirrored. Painfully so. Four walls of silver.

She spends hours after school looking at herself, naked, shivering the door locked and the windows shut.

The Californian heat doesn't reach her here and the cold seeps up through the white, teeth shaped tiles, up into her swollen toes, into her legs and stomach and arms and brain. A trace of goose bumps consumes her and the blood rushes to her feet leaving them blotchy and purple.

She stands observing, enraptured by her need to change. She examines every fold, twisting to reveal her hidden curves, making sure that nothing, _nothing_, overlaps.

This will all soon disappear. She'll scrape it all away, her starvation like sandpaper, to roughen away all her hollows and grooves. She'll whittle herself down, until her skin begins to peel, and like sellotape she'll drawn it away to reveal the rot beneath her.

She's festering inside. Under her skin. _Her cool blue skin._

Her hands rakes through her thinning hair. _I don't deserve it, not any of it. Not these thoughts not these feelings. I don't deserve a stomach or hair or eyes or teeth or a brain._

The punishment must continue, it must never end. _Ever._

To be or not to be?

Cat just didn't know

She didn't know if she wanted to be either.

_But probably nothing, because that sounded thinner._

.

.

She's alone in her room, swaddled in nothing but the flabby seat of her panties and her ill fitting bra. She stays quite still, too exhausted to move, too exhausted to get dressed. Everything has become an effort, but that just feeds the guilt even more. 6 miles a day, 6 miles that she walks at breakneck speed. It's the little things too; restlessly tapping her feet, sitting with her back ramrod straight, drinking pints of ice cold water because of the way it makes her stomach spasm and her arm shiver with her reptilian blood. But she can't do any of those now, she's completely flat.

Tiny star stickers glitter and glimmer from the ceiling above in the low sunlight. They were the product of summers spent with Jade, winters too, whole seasons consumed with her presence.

_They'd giggled and whispered and planned to set their parents up together. _

_They were both products of incomplete halves._

She's fallen out of touch with Jade over the past few weeks. She'd fallen out of touch with everyone. This righteous quest was all encompassing and her brain had been far to saturated with the avoidance of digestion to even allow thoughts of friends to enter in.

She missed her, missed her snarky comments, the furious glint in her eyes and the constant conviction in her voice.

They'd spent an age in this bed, heads bent together, hair entwined as they plotted their lives, the twists and turns they hoped to expect, the questions life had not yet thrown at them, but questions Jade's curiosity was keen to explore. Explore with her, hand in hand.

She needed Jade more than ever. She was scared. So so scared. Scared of her brain and the thoughts it conjured up, scared of the food, the food the swirled around her and refused to let her go.

'_We'll escape our mundane lives.' Jade had whispered 'Together.'_

She needed Jade more than ever.

But she was too exhausted to find her.

.

.

The days start to slip away. They merge together into one, like a strip of film, the stills standing alone, but always preceded and followed by something else. Her days are constructed around meals. How easy it is how her brain shifted. Like flood gates, the barriers of her mind have broken down.

She is becoming remarkably good at math now. The lack of food sharpens her mind. She can see the numbers before her. Perpetually floating in front of her face. She must be in check. Always; she must always know exactly where she is upon the planet.

Breakfast - duly missed

Lunch - Quorn burger; 98, ketchup, 15, water, 0 = 113

Dinner - Dry cereal - 84

Total - 197

_She wishes to weep._

_._

_._

On July 13th Jade hands her _the _flier. Cat remembers the hot breath of the summer and how the sun licked at her exposed back as she sat on the rough tarmac. Her house gave no solace to the sun, and the four walls rather acted as a prison for the heat, so she had fled to the blue eyed gaze of that hot face and was currently praying for a ripple of wind.

She looks up at Jade through her large-hearted shaped sunglasses from her position on the floor, a pair of which were far to large for her face now, which keep on slipping down, grazing her juttng cheekbones.

'What's this?' The question is already posed before she's even consulted the leaflet.

'Some play at the Round. D'ya want to come?' Jade breathes out from a drag of her cigarette.

Cat can't understand how she can inhale the smoke. Not in the heat. Dry smoke and hot air didn't mix, and the smell make Cat feel sick. _Good. _

Jade noted Cat's expression and crushes the stub under her heel, grinding it into a fine, pale grey dust.

'Blasted' Cat spells out, reading the blood red Helvetica jumping up from the page. 'What's it about?'

'Dunno, it says its Sarah Kane, you know, Psychosis?' Cat nods at the name, not quite getting the connection, but still knowing there was relevance.

'Yeah well, it should be good I guess.'

'Kk, I'll come. What about Beck?'

'He can't, said he'd promised André something, but he'll picked us up after.'

'Sounds good,' Cat chirrups, handing Jade back the leaflet, as the girl drops to the ground and places her self next to Cat on the hot, hot road.

Jade lights up another sickly cigarette and the two spend the rest of the afternoon inhaling gritty fumes.

.

.

_No - no, 400 is much better now. _

.

.

Cat has an irrational fear of theatres.

They're loud, brash and visceral. And the night had done nothing to relent the heat, so the small sports hall they were crowed into radiated heat and sweat from its four black walls and single door,

The two girls cut their way through the milling crowd, Jade a rum and diet coke filled plastic cup already in hand as she guides Cat towards their seats.

Row K presents a humble view of the eclectic stage and Cat is slightly relived at their distance.

A small light signals thrice and a unanimous hush falls upon the audience as the darkness descends upon them.

Dark figures shrouded by the absence of light begin to move. Cat can't see their complete figures but rather feels the bubbling presence of something out there, large, heaving and chilled.

A light, red and ugly rises high up in the rafters, the glow filtering down into the dusty room, flecks of nothing dancing, caught in it's headlight.

The figures are revealed, naked legs squirming beneath too tight dress, the clothing of a child stitched onto an adult, their age bursting from the seems. They begin they're dreadful dance. And her heart stops.

The dim lights rises, a circle of tables, all draped in the red and white check of a Parisian restaurant, though all connection of fine cuisine it thrown from the window with the presence of umpteen bowls and plates, ladles and dishes. All filled with a brown dank liquid.

_Food. _

Lot of food; all spread around, spaghetti hoops dripping from the sides, slabs of glistening meat lie on beds of dripping noodles.

The figures churn it up, using hands and teeth, the rooms feast is desecrated, demolished and dismembered. The carcasses of chickens are brought on, livers hanging off spits, thrust into the room and now as the figures turn their awful dance forwards, thrust onto the audience. They rise up into the isles, to consort with their spectators.

Cat cannot move, she is frozen stiff, paralyzed with fear. They must be able to smell it, these hellish creatures, as their eyes turn and they seek her out. A victim of her own fear, she sits there petrified as they saunter towards her. Juices are dripped on her head, meat pushed into her face. She isn't the only one. From the corner of her roving eye, she can see others, dotted around the isles, poor souls subjected to this gory violence.

Churned up food falls into her laps, from the hanging jowls of the spectres, as they leave her with gifts of muscle and starch, to move away to their next victims.

A bowl is now rolled on stage upon a plinth. Its curved hull is rusty with a reddish paint, as two slender hands grasp it's sides. A young woman, draped in white sheets, draws it up to her lips. Like a lamb she is the chosen sacrifice, as she begins to drink from the bowl, it's contents, slipping out from the corners of her mouth, is finally revealed. A dark crimson broth, swimming with chunks of something indefinable is drained from the bowl, into the woman's now swollen stomach.

The ceremony is complete.

The liquid renters the world once more, spilled out across the theatre floor, as the lost lamb, at last, regurgitates it up.

_An unwanted child, born from religion, swaddled in a cloak of visceral milk._

.

.

_It consumes her now. The madness. She can't scrub it from her eyes, for every time she blinks, she is back there, in that theatre being subjected over and over again. The smell has saturated her skin and no matter how may times she bathes, it will not leave her. She sleeps little and eats even less, a few bows of pasta dutifully swollen to keep her from descending into darkness. For then she would be fully immersed in that horrible fantasy._

_The food, the food must be eradicated from her body. _

_She doesn't mean to do it, but she finds her cheek pressed against the cold seat of the toilet, and a bowl full of sick a few inches below her._

_She's sick once, but cannot stop. Her mind drives her stomach into spasms, throwing up the little food she is able to consume between the sounds of her sustenance splattering across the bathroom floor. _

_She lost from school again. Two weeks this time. Too sick, too consumed in her madness to leave the bathroom._

_Her father believes the food poisoning is back, but he couldn't be more wrong. He's told to keep her hydrated and to feed her cold cucumber soup. And so he does, or tries too. The tiles soon become her bed, he dutifully brings her water and rubs her back as she dry heaves into the toilet; all remnants of food, long gone. _

.

.

'Cat?'

Jade stands in the doorway, tapping at the peeling paint that marks the boundaries of her room. Like some spectre, she hangs there, waiting for an invitation to enter. She hasn't seen Jade since the play and so she beckons her towards the bed, in wait for the questions about her absence.

But they never come.

Something's changed in Jade's face. Something subtly dramatic. Her eyes seem wider, no - not in surprise, but their proportions, their fit within her face has shifted. Jade's fingers slide between Cat's own in greeting.

'Your hands are cold.' Jade remarks.

'Yours are too.'

It's remarkable how hidden that small, subtle conviction it, carefully laced into her words, but Cat picks up on them instantly; the intonation, the delivery, _the meaning_.

'How long Cat?' Jade's normal resolve seems misplaced, her words quivering under their weight.

She feels ashamed to answer, to be caught, confronted by Jade of all people. But she relents, let's it spill out.

'Too long I think. The pollution happened long ago, I can't trace it back, but the oil, I'm drenched.'

'Me too,' Jade murmurs as she gathers her dress and pulls herself under the sheet to rest next to Cat.

_She is twisted skin, muscle pull, sucked in._

They lie there in the falling dust. Jade's hand, still capturing Cat's, squeezes gently.

'You've been avoiding me.'

'There were just, other things, on my mind.'

'_Other things._' Jade sighs. Cat surprised she hasn't been given the third degree, surprise by the lack of anger, of shock, of disgust.

Together they settle in the sheets and sink.

'Do you feel threatened?' Jade asks into the fading light.

'By who?'

'By me?'

'Never.'

Jade pauses, squinting her eyes to gaze up at Cat's embellished ceiling.

'By other people?' She then begins.

'Horrifically so.'

'Same here.' Jade murmurs wistfully.

'They're always there, looking, watching, observing, but never where they're meant to.'

'We'll get there someday Jade, I know we will.'

'Get where?'

'Nirvana,' Cat trances the length of the word with hollow fingers.

'Nirvana?' Jade questions.

'Yeah, that place where all is achieved, where what we strive for is finally captured.'

'Perfection?' Jade remarks.

'Completion.' Cat nods.

'Punishment.'

'Redemption.'

'Two sides of coin' Jade sighs. Cat doesn't like hearing the release of escaped air, it tears at her heart.

After a weighty contemplation, the lull of Jade's voice breaks out in the dusty silence.

'What will we do?'

'Nothing. We'll do nothing.' Cat decides.

'I think that would be for the best.'

Sweet smiles smoother them into slumber. Cat's eyelids flutter, the shapes that construct her room become incomprehensible and she falls into the deep, the last thing to permeate her conscious is the sharp, haggard rise of Jade creamy chest.

_Here I am,_

_Nirvana _

_._

_._

_She's fourteen years old and a new, precious temperament has taken over. _

_They've finally settled in Hollywood, a sprawling mess of manufactured strips of tarmac and artificial vices. _

_She's tying ribbons to the large tree, that like some organic stalagmite, erupts from the earth of her back yard, a central disturbance that during the summer months tracks the trace of the sky's shadow like a sun dial. _

_She's surrounded by white picket fences, which for miles stretch on and on, segmented by more painted panels of woods that designate each man's land. _

_She means to return to the house, to collect a further reel of ribbons, but a hunched figure catches the corner of her eye. A girl, her dark hair visible between the slats of the Cat's back fence, is slumped at the boundary. _

_Cat, slightly cautious directs her footsteps towards the girl. _

'_Hello,' She addresses her once she reaches the back fence._

_The girl looks round to see who's voice disturbs her peace._

'_Are you smoking?' Cat asks once seeing the familiar curl of smoke rise from the girl's nostrils. Like a dragon she snorts. _

'_Yeah.' _

'_It'll kill you.'_

'_That's the point.'_

_They lapse into silence, but Cat is unfazed, blissfully unaware of the girl animosity towards her. Cat refuses to leave, and so, seats herself as close to the girl as the wooden fence will allow. _

'_I've seen you before,' The girl tolerates her with a question. _

'_Really? How- cosmic.' _

'_Cosmic?' The girl splutters. _

'_Yeah, comic, stellar -' She struggles for a third mystical adjective. _

'_Radiant?' The girl asks, catching her glance._

'_Exactly.' _

_Again the silence descends and Cat sits there, watching the rings the girl blows from her puckered lips. _

'_You used to go to ballet, Didn't you?' Struck by the answer the girl twists round sharply, her cigarette flying from her hand, to settle discarded in the yellowing grass._

_Cat can only nod._

'_You still a dancer?'_

'_Not really. Unless you count around the living room,' Cat explains._

'_Same here. Prolific bedroom dancer.' She raises her hand as though pledging her life to the exploits of closed-door physical expression. _

'_Do you want a soda?' The girl holds up her own, previously hidden behind the angle of her lean body _

'_No, no thankyou.'_

'_You're not one of those strange kids who drinks only like organic kiwi juice right?'_

'_No! They just scare me, a little, sodas that is.'_

'_Pardon?' The girl looks genuinely stunned. _

'_Because perhaps they fill you up too much, with all them chemically things and then you explode, like a bomb. And die,' She demonstrates with her hands to carry across her point. _

'_We have diet?' Is her answer, because, well really that's the only other alternative. _

'_What's diet?'_

'_It's got like nothing in it, like no chemicals, no calories. My mom drinks it by the pint.'_

'_And she hasn't exploded yet?'_

_This makes the girl, for the first time break out into a smile. How pretty it is Cat notes. _

'_I wish she would!' On noticing Cat's alarm she shifts her voice 'But no - not yet. It's calorie free, so you can drink it till hell freezes over and it won't do jack to you'_

'_Calories?' Cat inquires._

'_Yeah calories.' He girl spells out the syllables on a frosted tongue. 'Ca - lore - ies.'_

_This girl likes calories, what ever they may be._

_Cat likes this girl._

_Perhaps she'll just have to chase them both then._

_._

_._

When she wakes, Jade is gone. The digital clock across the room bleeds out its red numerals, staining Cat's vision with the time. 5:27. She'd been asleep for half a day. She must have slept through dinner, for her stomach quivers with ferocity. She settles back down against the pillow, seeing no reason why she should arise properly just yet. A plan for the day begins to blossom, the excuses she'll tell, the little or no food, she'll consume, _14 raspberries (14) + 6cm of cucumber (6) + a quorn burger (98) + diet coke (1) = 119. _That'll be her plan. Perfect.

Her mouth feels empty, and yet so full.

Her mouth feels dirty.

_She wishes she could stop thinking. _

_She wishes she could wash away_

_A sea foam child regressed_

_Once again._

_._

_._

_._

Comments and reviews are truly glorious, and I would be grateful for any suggestions on how I might be able to improve this dirge of a fic.

Of course if anyone has any questions or opinions on the subject matter, again, don't hesitate to message me.


	3. Chapter 3

[**warning- potentially triggering material**]

Thankyou to all the lovely messages and reviews I've received over the past two chapters. You are all beautiful souls, and I wish with every fibre of my being that I could each give you a hug personally. Sorry for not updating, certain events have transpired and I've ended up on medication due to being deemed dangerous, and so I'm finding it really quite hard to hold onto reality.

If anyone is interested I keep a blog on where I stand with my treatment and recovery here: (do add the . com) I try my best to convey my thoughts as poetically as possibly.

I believed it was integral to the plot to introduce another point of view, so this chapter is constructed from Jade's perception.

.

_The content is mine, but the characters are the property of others._

.

**CHAPTER 3**

.

'_What will we do?'_

'_Nothing. We'll do nothing.' _

'_I think that would be for the best.'_

Her veins are filled with ice. Her skin as white as chalk.

The words blossom from Cat's mouth like bubbles of blood, and Jade relished in the taste of it.

She likes that taste, but very little else.

.

.

_She stands alone, bare feet throbbing upon the pavement. She's just ran for what feels like miles, yet in reality is only a few blocks. His car is long gone, speeding off round a corner a little over twenty minutes ago. Like a statue she holds fast, unwavering in her solid stance. She refuses to move, that would break the spell. _

_For now, in the eyes of the new dawn, she is alone in the street. For now she is just Jade, eight-years-old, scabby knees and bitten nails, her hair in some crazy construct of her pillows doing. She is just Jade, young and part of a complete parentage. For now, she is Jade, and she still has a father. _

.

.

Cat looked perfect in the hazy light. Her eyelids fluttered shut, as the butterfly wings of her lashes draped themselves upon the dark hollows of her bruised under-eyes.

Her admission, and Jade's agreement had shifted something between them. Jade felt the pooling of unease as she lay there, watching the slow rise of Cat's concave chest.

The words that poured from the girl's chapped lips could have come from her own. The tales of desperation, of deliberate punishment that shaped their dependencies.

.

.

_She could pinpoint the moment she began to hate herself. Despising the very flesh that hung on her big bones. Craving carving out a hollow in her chest to prove to everyone she was as heartless and inhuman as all the wind light tittering had wailed. _

_They feared her too much to touch her, she knew their thoughts towards her were unkind. A cruel temper brewed up inside her young body, yet all that witnessed it merely whispered behind manicured hands and blamed the missing Mr. West. _

_Her mother had screamed and shouted and finally after night long phone calls and racked up phone bills been able to see her father, her newly lost husband. Jade had not. _

_It made perfect sense for the still little girl to follow suit; to scream and shout, just as her mother had done; for in her minds eye that should finally allow her to see her father. _

'_He doesn't want to see you,' was the short message spat out by her mother, through booze bent teeth. _

_The alcohol was something new. The continuing motions of divorce had rattled her bones and a swift change had taken place within Marie West. She had transformed before her daughter almost over night, the first appearance of 'M' being the morning she had woken to find the space next to her empty; only a note to explain the absence. She had torn up the house looking for him, as though he might be hiding beneath the sofa or in the cabinet above the sink. After that she had receded into her room, locked the door, and for the next month only left to receive more wine and more pop tarts._

_The house her father left them in was like a castle; large and cavernous, marble flooring that meant only hours of aimless sliding to a child. It was easy to forget her mother even lived in the house, their lack of proximity meaning that Jade could walk freely through the lined walls, and never encounter her mother in her prowling. The maids, two women Jade was used to catching occasional sight of, were nowhere to be found. The lack of employment explained the bowls of rotting fruit and the smell of decaying flowers that hung in the air like a decomposing convict. Her father had condemned her mother to an imprisonment of dependence upon his wealth. And as she slowly shrunk away, fueled on reds and whites, as her surroundings slowly rotted away, it became an unkempt punishment that Jade was now shackled to as well._

_The short delivery of her father's message was passed on in the ill light of the evening, four weeks since his disappearance, since his escape. They passed each other in the hallway, Jade carrying her own hands, her mother, another bottle to add to her growing collection. Her father's wealth had bought a wine cellar to large to be appropriate. Her mother had found solace in that dark room, and sometimes Jade wished she could lock her down there, as though she were a wicked witch, so Jade for once could be to one leaving, not the eternally abandoned. _

_It was the morning she found her mother collapsed on the floor, blood pooling out between her legs, that the confusion of self doubt and ill formed thoughts of distortion finally swirled together and cemented the self loathing in her stomach, to sit there like a rock. _

_Like a ghost, she passed through the house, looped the phone from its cradle, and calmly dialed those three universal digits. She sat by the front door, goose bumps prickling across her thighs, as they pressed to the cool marble floor. She watched as the paramedics loaded her mother up into the ambulance, as the neighbors crowded around her lawn, treading their stiletto heels into the thinning grass, crocodile tears pouring from perfected eyes. She stood there in the doorway, blank. __For the love of all things hold she could not draw herself up to cry. Everyone else was, yet she couldn't even conjure up the vapor of a tear._

_It turns out her mother was miscarrying that last remnants of her father. Their marriage, ended, splattered across the white tiles, sealed in a tiny lacquered coffin. _

_She hates herself for not caring, for neglecting to worry for the woman who calls herself her mother. _

_She soon begins to scratch._

.

.

And there it lay. The foundations of her disorder, brewing beneath the immaculate black varnish that was the organic structure many called her 'defense mechanisms'. It cumulated there; lying on Cat's plush bed, her fingers buzzing with a cold electricity as she slowly traced the lines of Cat's flush of hair, fanned across the her sheets, as the still smaller girl slumbered.

The two had signed themselves away to a Faustian plot, a deal with the devils between them.

She wants to hoist up her top and peal down the waistband of her panties to reveal to the sleeping girl the red jail bars that lined the curving flesh where thigh met stomach. She wants to bare all to her, but instead, she lies there, not knowing whether to stay or to leave.

Rising from the smog of Cat's decadent mind she turns to gaze down at the shrinking indent of the bed. Soon Cat's weight would be lithe enough that the girl would float above the bed, resting upon a cloud of fallen hair and wasted sanity.

And so she leaves.

She's gone.

.

.

_The scratches turn to scars._

_Eleven ragged lines; to count each year she'd been upon the earth._

_They lose the house in the divorce, but the settlement her mother receives is enough to pay for a single storied lifestyle in a quiet pastel coloured bungalow. _

_She finds relief in peeling back her skin and soon her stomach is red raw with claw marks. In a vicious cycle her body heals, patterning her body with the crusts of scabs, and in moments of desperation she pulls them off, their combat a constant give and take. _

.

.

She cuts because she can. Because she can't do anything else that comes close to feeling.

She hides them away behind her cotton briefs as her own little swallowed secret.

7 pounds of flesh her malady demands, for her weight hasn't shifted since yesterday.

Panic begins to settle in her stomach as the number _88 _punches up again on the scale.

Her stomach screams at her for such a silly sight.

A single pound would have been a delight, yet her body tortures her for staying so static.

Instantly a plan formulates within her mind, and food is completely absent.

As much as she wishes to deny it, Cat's descent triggers ugly feelings within her. A silent storm brews in her mind, a sick feeling of injustice that compels her to run faster and further than before.

She finds her slipping into instances of doubt. Flashing moments populated by spectres racing past her streaming heart, obscured by weeping eyes. Her face is bathed in cool sweat as her mind leaves her body and the only anchor to the physical world is the rhythmic pace of her pounding feet.

Her eyes blur and then focus.

She finds herself gazing out across the freeway, her view elevated by a crossing bridge; it's rusting railings tightly in her grasp. Sweat drips from her face, and like a dream; her mind is blank as to how she made it onto this lonely bridge. Her legs feel like rocks, refusing to budge from her cemented position, stuck surveying the throbbing stream of steel bodies, all lobbying for a precious place in the slipstream.

Cat's compressed chest flashes within her mind and an urge coolly slips down her spine to slumber in her mind.

How quick it would be to end it all. To slip over the railing and for a few precious seconds to tumble in the air, a light suspense before shattering across the hot tarmac floor and remain weightless forever. For the blood to pour from her body by the pint and watch the pounds slip, slip, slip away.

She takes one last glance at the dizzying speed of the cars below, and with great reverence, slowly drags her heavy body home.

.

.

_If she keeps on running, perhaps one day she'll catch him_

_The flushed feeling reminds her all too well of that morning. That is what she's chasing, what she is trying to reconstruct; to resurface the memories of a suburban paradise, seconds before its collapse. The motions of physical exercise make her feel little again; she is eight once more, running after his car. _

_Just run a little faster. Just that little bit more and you'll get closer and closer. _

_To what she doesn't know. _

_In her mind, it's the image of his slowly disappearing car, the colour she cannot remember, the registration hazy. But that car contains her father, and for that she will forever chase him. _

_The further she runs the closer she gets to holding on to him, stopping him from leaving. Perhaps if she'd been a better child, a nicer person, perfect enough for both her and her mother; he might have stayed._

_So just another mile, just keep on running down those streets, and perhaps one day, she might find him once more. _

.

.

Her head's beneath the tap, her gaping mouth greedily guzzling down the lukewarm water in an attempt to stave off her hunger. The water sits like a child beneath her ribs and as she turns to fit the plug into its hole she can feel it slosh with her shifting gravitation. She twists the bath's taps hastily and begins to undress.

The reflection above the sink faces the full-length mirror nailed to the back of the door and in recent months has become her most familiar place to be. Both a sanctuary and a frozen hell, for it's additional dimensions of perceptive.

Her skin is plagued by a greyish tinge and a light wafting of creamy hair, tuffs like those upon a baby's head coat the length of her spine and cheeks. As she shifts and twists to take in the full image of her diminishing body the muscles play about her legs, relaxing and contracting, as though if they made themselves noticed, her body might not continue to devour their meat. Her ribcage could play a tune, for the bars that house her lungs are predominant and gaping, taught ridges rippling across her skin. If she were to look close enough she would see the faint pulsating of her slowly beating heart.

The creamy water rises as she slowly lowers her naked body in, gasping at the heat.

Her sunken cheeks make an uncomfortable seat, and as she settles herself she can feels the sockets of her hip grating upon the floor of the bathtub.

She lies there for hours, days, full rotations of the earth until the water turns cold and she's left shivering.

Her hands chafe at her arms in a feeble attempt to generate heat.

She's been living on green tea and apple slices. Once upon a time she would've consumed three reduced meals, each a measure of 500 calories. The descent into her disorder saw the absence of lunch first, then breakfast, then the reduction of dinner to only vegetarian meals. The obsession with calories became crippling, why have all those extras, when one's diet could be reduced to so little? Why eat, when there's the choice not to? Months now had blended into one single blur, the only passage of time being the drop from 135 pounds down to 88, 1500 calories, down to a light 50. But still even that was too much. Why have 50 when you could have 40?

The water had pruned her tired skin, the ripples of her fingertips tracing the slicing path of her erupting hipbone. The water soothes the smattering of bruises that played across her hips from the pinching and punching and constant pursuit of perfection. Now that she had found them, she never wanted to let them go.

Her skin is sliced about the hips; scabs coat the brutal sawing of her scissors. Fumbling with her arms, she pulls back the flesh, examining their length at every angle, searching for the waves and troughs of her wavering bones.

The wet weight she feels between her rolling fingers, which rove painful across her body, flattening and constricting her thighs, her arms, her stomach, is enough to make her blanch. The calorie absent jello pots she had just gorged herself on make themselves noticed in the recesses of her stomach, their berry coloured fluids having slipped past her lips a mere hour ago. She is sure her mother's riding the tides of a chemically induced slumber but to ensure her secrecy she pulls the shower curtain about the bath tub and stands, twisting the nozzle and releasing a jet of ice cold water upon her head. Repeating the mantra 'shivering away the fat' seems to numb the shock, and soon her waxy fingers feel no more, like two wet slugs as they slides themselves down her throat.

_88 pounds_ plagues her mind and she imagines it's those two numbers jammed in her mouth, it's those two numbers drawing the contents of her stomach up into the fresh air.

She empties herself across her feet, a red and white bile spraying from her mouth to swirl around her ankles. She can't be sure if it's blood or jello but the sick still remains in the tub, for in her haste she forgot to pull the plug. Her throat screams out as it dissolves in the acidic sting of her stomach's contents, her teeth too, howling out for relief from that unnatural nausea.

She finishes her purge in the toilet, the spray from the shower tickling her naked back. Within the bowl the final contents of her stomach rests; the bile lacteous in its milky churn.

.

.

_She's rotting inside. _

_She's waiting for her release _

_She's searching for what's beneath her waxy skin. Who she is, and how she's made; layers of upon layer of pillowed fat, all stuffed and sewn into her splitting sides. _

_She wants to be the girl she has to potential to be, elegant and kind, delicate and refined. _

_She wants to be so full of dreams that it consumes her, that her aspirations suck the flesh from her bones. _

_Yet the scales still read 88. That dreadful number that makes her want to bleed out or be hit by a bus. She wants to wash the weight away, to finally step down from this plateau and continue to sink. _

.

.

She can't sleep for the third consecutive night, and she thinks she's going delirious.

Every time she tries to close her eyes the number_ 88_ flashes up behind her lids and the voices screams out for her to jump and shiver, to make any kind of movement that might burn a few more precious calories.

She drags herself to Beck's in the hope that his presence might soothe her raging mind. She feels dangerous and she needs him to hold her down.

Like always his bed is welcome to her and together they count the dulcet drones of passing cars. His phone alights from across the floor with a vibration, strong enough to rouse him from his stoop. He rises to get it, but remains in silence, across the room.

He's staring at her with curious eyes. Usually in the hazy darkness there's pubescent lust swimming about in those irises, but now, from across the darkened room she senses something else.

'You've lost weight,' Beck murmurs.

'Stop being a shit.'

'I'm just being straight with you Jade.'

She appreciates that, it's how their relationship works, but a familiar titter in the corners of her minds whisper to her _attack, attack, he's attacking you, attacking us. _

'I'm on the pill, my weight fluctuates. You know that,' She states it like a fact, a barb stings about her words.

'I know that. But I thought it would never be a problem.'

'Then don't make it one,' Her voice is rising in pitch and volume, whilst his stays frustratingly level.

They fall back into silence, another car hurtles past.

'I can put my hands around your waist Jade.' He whispers out into the dark, his eye downcast, almost in shame.

'So?'

'I don't want to be able to do that!' His voice is suddenly loud; it fills the room and pushes into her face.

She stands, wide-eyed in shock. He doesn't ever shout, and yet she can still feel the hot angry breath across her check. Tears rattle down to extinguish the flaming aftermath of his words as she silently leaves his trailer.

She's accustomed to walking in the dark, the presence of the sun makes little difference to her. It's the same route she always takes home from his. Each location has a different route home, preplanned, already measured out with an old curly street map, so that she can ensure she is taking the longest possibly route. Large detours are made for a multitude of rules her silly minds conjure up. The amount of change in her pocket denotes that a loaf of bread can be bought, and so already she takes an extra ten minutes to walk to a shop she already knows is closed. She now retraces her steps to a 24-hour gas station, the lurid lights calling to her queasy eyes.

She pushes all thoughts of their argument from her mind and concentrates on how many steps she's taking; her count rapidly rising up through the triple digits.

She traipses about the aisles of the store like a ghost, the fluorescent lighting washing out her skin, the sickly pallor rising up from her pores like visible smog. A large loaf, the size and feel of a plush pillow is wrapped in her arms and promptly placed on the waxy counter. The boy behind the counter asks whether or now she's actually going to eat that. She just brushes the comment away with two jabbed fingers and a curt snort. She's a regular here so he's allowed to be cheeky.

Her feet now take her north, and with her brain absent she walks into the blue bruised night, the inclination of the street rising. She's at the memorial gardens, patches of neglected grass circling a large pool of water. The silent shadows of the mooring ducks trace across the lightly rippling water, their muffled whispers and night-time kisses calling out to each other upon the cool breeze.

The mirrored surface breaks with the missiled lump of bread thrown from her clawed hand. It bobs slowly upon the light waves, as the ducks mechanically circle it, consuming every sodden morsel within moments. The rest of the loaf shares the same fate.

She thinks _good riddance_, and settles down on the grass to watch the ripples from the gliding ducks.

She would fall asleep, but the allure of the further two miles that could be taken home is great enough to feign off exhaustion.

She picks herself up and storms off into the still quiet night.

.

.

_Burns and cuts litter her hips. _

_He'll kiss them one by one in a silent saluting apology_

.

.

The lights are on inside, which to her fading observance, means little. She is drained. Her calves cry out in an exhilarated rush of adrenalin, whilst her stomach tries to coax her into consumption. It's been two weeks now. Two weeks fuelled on nothing but egg whites and water. Two weeks and no shift in weight. A single second more and she thinks she'll snap.

The key finally fits in the lock after a few ill aimed jabs, and after grappling with the twisting motion, the door is finally unhinged and she is able to enter.

She prefers not to draw her mother's attention, as that will only surface questions about dinner, so she remains silent as she begins to tread through the single levelled house. Her room is located at the back, so on ached foot; she pads her way through the single story of their bungalow

Passing through the kitchen to collect a glass of water, she notices the figure out of the corner of her eye. A man, still draped in a trench coat sits at the table.

When her milky pallor transforms enough to resemble her shock, his head turns to take in her face.

'Your smile, I always thought I'd caught a wolf.' His voice has been roughened by the trade of tobacco and gin; monosyllabic in its entrance into the room.

'I'm not smiling,' she retorts.

'No you're not.' he remarks sombrely.

'I think you should leave.' she says without meeting his eye. She hardly believes the words slipping out from her own mouth, for the man she has chased stands before her. But in some madness she desires nothing more than to banish that spectre from her home. For her, the kitchen houses many enemies and there is no room for another.

'I want us to go for dinner,' he wastes no time in building bridges, but her shores recede as soon as he stands.

'Perhaps.' The flicker of an idea flexes itself within her minds. Her father sitting at a table, alone, swimming in a crowd of coupled people, abandoned and discarded. She answers as such to entertain the thought, the brilliance of the plan enough to fill her up.

'I'm in town for a few days. Five. Until Saturday.'

'Cool,' she replies, instantly feeling foolish, once more immersed in the childhood this man stole.

He walks towards her, and clasping a full hand upon her shoulder, shakes her slightly, verbally motioning to exit with a hastened; 'See you round kiddo.'

He leaves the room and she does not breath until she hears the definite thud of the front door swinging shut.

The decay of a father, divine.

The death of a daughter entwined.

.

.

_He'd woken her that morning, to deliver to her cheek a kiss. _

_That, like in all the fairy tales he had once filled her head with, was enough to draw her out from her slumber. _

_Her hazy mind didn't comprehend and she'd weakly begged him to leave and let her sleep. _

_Waiting for the usual unclasping of a belt, she groggily awoke to find the room empty of the man, his presence absent for a now steadily lengthening eternity. _

"_Daddy?' she'd called out, but he'd never answer. She'd slipped from her bed and pulled on a pair of panties, the ones he'd said were cute, as well as her slippers, padding out into the hallway. A cool breeze had played about her knees as the empty corridors echoed out her cries. Following their reverberations she'd travelled down the main staircase to find the source of the chill._

_He'd left the front door open, from which she heard the sound of the car's ignition. _

_The slippers were discarded as she'd raced from the house._

.

.

She leaves the bungalow as soon as the morning breaks, fearful her father might resurface upon the porch, perhaps from a taxi or from her own nightmare. She thought she'd be elated at the reappearance of the man for so long she'd been chasing, but the only feeling that settles in her stomach is a queasy fear. School is naturally closed and so, she takes to the streets, feeling the cool morning air play about her sheer face as she glides through avenues and streets.

In the end she's late for school, and so seeing no reason to go to lessons, curls herself up on the closed lid in one of the girls' toilet cubicles. Her thoughts slip to her father again as she traces the length of her legs with feather light fingertips. Usually she would have already told Beck, slipped from the house as soon as her father had done so and run to his. But she and Beck are at odds. She feels too deflated to engage with him and all she wants to do is crumple, like those little balls of scrunched up toilet paper, those that methodically rotted in the cubicle's corners.

She didn't care if at this moment the only thing filling Beck's heart was hurt. Eventually she'd transform it into love and his adoration would become genuine. For she was sure all his kisses were just feeble attempts to suck the fat from under her tongue, his roving hands searching her flesh for the zipper that might let her padded guts spill out from their seems and made holding her a little less grotesque.

Her father too was the same. It all made sense, why he left, why she had never been able to catch him, why he too had grasped at her waist. Her fat feeble thighs, the flabby wings that hang from her arms, the rolls that spurge about her middle as she bend over the now uncovered toilet.

She purges to rid herself, not this time of food, but of the feelings, pent up and ready to burst. She purges the truths she had hidden in her heart for all the world to see. For everyone to pass by and see the fat swirling in that toilet bowl, the fat that had driven away her father, the fat that repulsed her boyfriend, the fat that made her contemplate so dearly plucking out her eyeballs. The butterflies are released to prattle out their woes in the toilet's basin, swirling around in the milky chime.

The bell rings to signal lunch and she sees this as a prompt to escape the cubicle's confines. She shakes as she washes her hands, their bloodless tips unfeeling under the hot dribble of water. She shoulders her bag and leaves on unsteady feet.

As she walks down the hallway people turn their head.

They turn their heads and blow at her.

Try and blow her away.

_Don't they fucking understand?_

_She's the big bad wolf. _

_She does the blowing. _

.

.

_She 15 when she decided she wants to die._

_She realises the atrocities that have played out between her legs and wishes to leave this earth behind. _

_To be swallowed by the rotating tires of a truck and be crushed to a bloody pulp. _

_She begins to collect pills in a money jar, labelling it her 'escape fund'. _

.

.

Sleep evades her.

She hasn't slept for days, for creatures haunt her dreams.

They come in trench coats to swallow her whole and drench her in sick.

She runs though winding alleyways, her knees banging together as she desperately sprints from the spectres. The stretch of street becomes thinner and thinner, too narrow for her enlarging frame. Soon she cannot fit and from between her legs they rip away her hidden stars, that slowly burning spark.

They slip from her mind and beat about in the shadows. The dark projection throb like a ceaseless heart and she squeals and cries and begs for sleep, for a release from this now physical reality. She can feel the shadow's hand fingering their way up her legs, feeling about her middle where that two-digit dimension sits.

_88 pounds of worthless slut. 88 pounds that could have been filled by something else, someone else. Go end yourself you repugnant turd. _

She's in the bathroom, clawing through the cabinet. She'll put an end to this; drain her mind of consciousness by pulling the chemical plug.

She can't decide on how many she'll have, and panic rises in her stomach.

She needs to be deliberate and direct for this hazily formed plan to work, two qualities that at this moment have deserted her.

The cap finally pops off the bottle, and countless white teeth spill out onto the glistening floor.

Before the moisture of the shower dissolves her little white supposed saviours she scoops them up and one by one swallows them down without care or thought, her only intention is to save these lifeless pills from drowning.

_46 _

_46 calories counted so far _

_46 pills prescribed as such_

She feels so empty, and yet so full.

Slumped upon the bathroom floor she waits for her sight to wane and for sleep to finally settle in.

The beat of the shower drowns out the notion of time and she is unsure now of where she is, what spectral plane does she now inhabit? Because surely not earth? The real world is far too painful and complicated, but she's cured that now with her pills. Washed away all need to think, all need to count, all need to eat.

For the final time, she claws her way up the bathroom wall and steps onto the scales. The number 88 flashes up in red once more and she feels her mind slowly collapsing from defeat. She's ready to dissolve when on shifted foot the scales still do not alter. In her dazed mind she rolls around on the balls of her feet, trying to change the number with an alternating gravity, when the tiny screen flickers, and the message _low _flashes up.

_Low. Low battery._

Her eyes widen as the scale resets to _88. _

Comprehension finally sinks in. The scales are broken. 88 being the default number; each of the tiny bars that construct the numerals flicker into life, so naturally 88 is the number displayed when the machine is faulty.

The weight of the pills pool in her stomach, dragging her down by the edges of her mind. The corners of her eye pull down and her sense of balance slowly collapses as her knees buckle beneath her and she crumble to the cool, hard floor with a smack.

She is going.

She is gone.

And finally, everything fades from sight.

.

_The sounds of motions permeate_

_A vehicle can be heard outside _

_She's finally found her father_

_But now, that's just not enough._

.

_The collarbone queen takes to her throne._

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Comments and critiques are welcomed. Of course if anyone has any questions or opinions on the subject matter, again, don't hesitate to message me.


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